In October 1862 the Ohio regiment lost nearly forty percent of its five hundred men on the field at Perryville. After heavy fighting at Stone’s River the following year, Beatty was promoted to brigadier general. In these pages the cost of union is carefully weighed by an intelligent and modest man who never glorifies war. Advancing through the South with the Army of the Cumberland, he lives to tell about the horrific battles at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. Whether describing large events in Kentucky, Tennessee, and elsewhere or the quiet times of camp life, Beatty never loses personal perspective
Steven E. Woodworth, in his introduction, writes about the life of this extraordinary “ordinary man,” whose diary, originally published in 1879, “stands out as one of the dozen or so best memoirs of the Civil War for its clarity, honesty, humor, and plain good sense.”
